As a member of both the New York Library and Creative Commons, I received a lot of advance notice about this week’s discussion entitled “The Battle Over Books: Authors and Publishers Take on the Google Print Library Project”. And, thanks to Larry Lessig, I got a chance to be in the audience during this match-up which forced me to reshape my thinking about Google, about Web 2.0, and about copyright regimes. Framing the debate The discussion centered largely around the Google Print Library Project and Google’s decision to scan books without first asking for authorization from the copyright holders. They do content, however, that they will remove books from their index if the copyright holder asks them to do so. In the last few months, the Author’s Guild and the American Association of Publishers have sued Google, alleging violations of copyright law. Meanwhile, a separate effort set up by some of Google’s competitors (notably Yahoo! and Microsoft) and called the Open Content Alliance has taken an opt-in approach to scanning copyright holdings, including only content that is no longer under copyright protection or content that has been expressly authorized by the copyright holder. This effort has not been sued by…